Alcatel Unleashed

Hi,

I have done a ton of reading and trying things, but I'm just not working it out..

I have a 7210 SAS -D ETR, which I have manged to password/config reset etc.

I am trying to configure it so it will just act as a switch, with gigabit ethernet and fibre interfaces. I don't need or want routing or vlans or anything else, that's all being done by a firewall sitting behind it, with an ethernet WAN interface.

It doesn't seem to be as straight forward as I would expect.

I've gone through and configured the interfaces, and I can get links to come up etc, but I can't get the IP interface to work (accessing it via serial/console), and I don't know if I need to configure IES or EPIPE or what on it, in order for it to pass traffic between the ports.

I was able to configure an EPIPE service with 1 fibre and 1 ethernet, but I don't know if that even worked, as I don't have the other end of the fibre setup yet. I got errors when I tried to add another ethernet interface to it, which I was hoping to use for initial testing.

I am hoping to be able to just configure the things a switch, so I can do my testing using ethernet in and out, and then switch to having a fibre connection instead of a secondary ethernet.

Is there some cheat sheet for setting this up, or am I just missing something obvious?

It all got very complicated with setting up customers and ports and modes and services and tagging and and ..

Or am I trying to use the wrong tool for the job, and I should just sell this on ebay and buy a media converter?

Hi,

The 7210 is not a traditional switch in the sense of the word, but it can certainly do what you're trying to do.

It has no real sense of VLANs, but you can create a VPLS - a virtual type of switch.

So do the following:

/configure service vpls XXX customer 1 create
no shutdown
sap 1/1/x create
exit
sap 1/1/x create
exit

for XXX pick any number, it's called the service ID.

Now add in all the ports you need as saps. This now will create a virtual switch for you joining all of ports you add as saps.

If the ports are configured for anything like dot1q, you will need to set them back to null for this to work, but I think it's non VLAN tagged you are looking to use.

If you want to check your MAC table for above, just do:

show service id XXX fdb detail

thanks
Paramount

Thanks, that's very helpful.

To provide more information, I am trying to set this up for a friend, who has a Bell (Canada) fibre connection, and we're going to try to use it to bypass all the junk equipment they provide, so that a pfsense box can be connected directly to the fibre.

I don't have a fibre connection myself, which is why I need to setup/test via a secondary ethernet port first, and then hope that it will plug into the fibre and work..

My concerns are that other than the fact it needs a PPPoE(oF?) connection setup, there may be VLANs on the fibre that will need to be passed or converted.

I'm just going on the information I can find online, such as here: https://forums.redflagdeals.com/please- ... r-1993629/

That indicates that VLAN 35 is in use on the WAN/fibre side, so the 7210 would either need to pass this traffic to the ethernet, and I can configure the ethernet interface on the pfsense box to handle the tagging, or it could strip the tag(s) and pass it untagged. Not sure what would be easier.

There also may be a need for MAC spoofing/cloning on the WAN/fibre interface.. I really don't know why ISPs make things so difficult, and I have worked for several of them.

Hi,

OK, so you can certainly do VLAN manipulation if need be on the 7210.

If you enable a sap x/x/x:<vlan> on one side (in an pipe or vpls)
and then sap x/x/x:0 or just sap x/x/x on the other

This will strip the vlan downstream and re-add back upstream.

No PPPoAnything on 7210 either.

Cheers
Kieran